Eddie Bracken’s Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith’s problems begin when in 1944 he is honorably discharged from the service before serving overseas due to chronic hay fever. Yet, in his hometown hungry for heroes, he becomes one anyway. For film scholar James Harvey, “[Preston Sturges] finds a special and excruciatingly funny way to talk about American life—a way to express its strange and often panicking energies, even its peculiar decencies, without ever telling us comforting lies about it. And in this respect at least, Hail the Conquering Hero is nearly the summit of his work.”

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